Thoughts on hog growing

Connor describes his automated hog houses and defends his method of growing hogs as the cleanest and most efficient. He describes the hog lagoon waste disposal system in a lengthy discussion at the end of the passage. In addition to discussing the technical aspects of his job, he defends its morality, offering his viewpoint on abortion as he does so.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with James W. (Jim) Connor, December 19, 1999. Interview K-0818. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

Let's get back to the hog houses. Can you just
describe what the life of a hog is in that house? There's so
many people who don't know, who hear what they hear in the
news and so forth. You go in, you're feedingߞ.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Everything is pretty much automated. It's climate controlled.
You've got fans in there to circulate the air all the time.
You've got kit fans to pull the ammonia out so they
won't stay in there with the animals. Curtain drawn
thermostats. You've got foggers around the side if the
temperature gets up over eighty-eight degrees it puts a mist
of water on two minutes out of eight. The buildings
are designed where there's like either twenty or twenty-two
pigs in each pen. That's allowing each one of them seven and
a half square feet for optimum growth. They'll make the first
pull at thirteen weeks. Animals are like humans. Some of them are going
to grow faster than others. So at thirteen weeks, they'll
come in and take the big ones out and go ahead and market them.
They'll be up to around two forty, in that area. That gives
more space for what's left in there. You try to keep them
comfortable or they won't perform.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

So the pigs are comfortable?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Oh yeah.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

They're happy.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Oh yeah. You saw how they're jumping around when you went in
to take pictures. That's their whole thing in life is for the
consumer. You keep them comfortable. You can't just be cruel
to animals. You've got to like them. You go in there and
giving them shots. They'll get to know you.
They'll talk to you when you come in there and run up to the
gate. When a strange person goes in there, they're kind of
lay back until they see everything's all right and then
they'll come out.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

A pig's pretty smart.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Oh they're the smartest animal there is. They say
that's the only animal that's ever been able to
figure out a three-way latch. Horse can't do it; cow
can't do it; a dog, a cat, a monkey. But a pig can.
That's pretty neat.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

So you feel like you have a relationship with these pigs somewhat like
you do those cats out there.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

I look after them like I look after that lab. You got to worry about
their health. Keep them happy; keep them comfortable.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

What would you say to a person who says, 'I just
don't understand how you can care for animals and then go and
know they're going to be killed?' What would you
say?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

That's why they're grown. That's what
one of these abortionist rights people was telling me one time. I think
you're the least caring of theߞand this just
happened in our family. My son that's a pilot, his wife was
four month along and they went to do the scan to see if it's
a boy or a girl. When they did it and looked at it, the doctor said,
'This is not good.' The liver and lungs were on
the outside. They said she could go full term but it'll live
five minutes. They went to Wake Forest two weeks ago and took it.

ROB AMBERG:

That's really hard.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

But anyway, the story I was going to tell you is this abortion person
was telling me, that's wrong, that's wrong
that's wrong. You should never do that to anything. I
don't care.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Do what?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Kill or abort a baby or something like that. I said, 'You eat
eggs?' They said, 'Yeah. I said,
'You're eating an unborn chicken.
What's the damned difference?' And my youngest
son, the one that's managing the two thousand
unitߞmy mom about twelve years ago had to have heart surgery.
The valve on top of her heart was bad. They couldn't put a
synthetic valve in; so they put a pig valve in. It comes from a special
Russian hog. They had to put a pig valve in there, and he was doing a
paper his senior year in college. He did it on that
pig saving his grandmother's life. He said the first time
that professor read that thing and cried.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah. My father has a pig valve.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

It's amazing. The synthetic ones just wouldn't go
in there because she had rheumatic fever when she was a child and it
damaged the flapper valve on top of the heart. They had to put that pig
in there. You look, all your burn tissue comes from pigs, where they
graft. Heart valves, shoes, belts, bacon, pork chops. And a pig is the
only animal that you've got three shots a day at the
consumer. You've got bacon, sausage, and country ham for
breakfast. You've got your sandwich meats for lunch.
You've got pork chops and ham roasts and stuff like that for
dinner. It is the only animals that you've got three shots a
day at the consumer. You think about that. People don't eat
steak three meals a day. You don't eat chicken three meals a
day. You might if you went to Hardee's and get a chicken
biscuit or something like that or a steak biscuit. But really,
you're wide open, three meals a day at the consumer.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

So do you think that the market is going to be good from now on for
hogs.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Yeah. I think it's going to be good. You're going
to have to put up with the environmentalists, so called, and the
activists and people like that. But as long as you're eating
and as long as you keep the pigs tissue for skin grafts and things like
that. I don't see any slacking off on it. Unless the whole
country goes to vegetarian. That's not going to happen.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

So you've got people out here eating meat and
you've got international markets now, like you said, China,
Russia. Is this the best way to raise them?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Yeah. I think it's the only way to raise them. If you were to
raise these same hogs that I've got on this farm, twenty four
hundred eighty of them and you had them out on the range,
it's going to take you twice as long to get them to market.
They're going to be in the ditches and in the streams and
everything else. It's just making one mess.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Is that polluting too?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

That's more pollution that what you
doߞthere's no pollution at all here. None.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Where's it all go then?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

It goes in these spray fields out here.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Go back to the time when the manure drops through the slats. Tell what
happens to it?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

They've got an automatic flush system on it that flushes it
out of the building into a lagoon.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

And the lagoon is about how big?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

It's predicated on how many animals. You have to build the
lagoon to accommodate how many animals are going to be on that facility.
I don't know the formula on that. The soil and water people
calculate it, and then you do it to their specifications.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

To build the lagoon you say you have to put clay in it.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

You don't have to put clay in it but preferably you have a
clay base seals it so it won't seep out. They have rubber
liners they put in them but they can't say that when they put
them in that the equipment doesn't puncture it or something
like that. But you can tell whether it's leaking or not.
You've got to pump that thing out four or five times a
year. Pump it down to keep it in your twenty-four
hour one hundred year event. You know it's not leaking.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

So we were up there and it was raining. But I didn't smell
the lagoon. I smelled the fans, the hog odor coming out of those. The
lagoonߞ.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

You won't smell them.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Why not? Why wouldn't you smell it?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

It's just the aerobic action of the lagoon is like a great
big septic tank without a lid on it. It's decomposing all the
time. If you get a real foggy heavy morning, you'll smell it.
But most of the time you won't. I'd say
ninety-nine percent of the time, you'll never know
it's there. That's not like turkeys and chickens.
That's some strong litter. I guess, it's the
amount of ammonia in it or something. I don't know how.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

The ammonia is staying in the hog.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Well, it's going of into the atmosphere, pretty much is the
way it works.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Okay, so it's flushed out every so often, every thirty
minutes.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Whatever long it takes to fill the tank up.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

And then it goes into this holding unit, and then what do you do with
it?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

We've got an irrigation system. We pump off the top eighteen
inches because the solids are going to the bottom. You pump off the top
eighteen inches and put it on your fields through aߞI use a
portable reel, which I can put the reel out and pull my hose out eight
hundred and eighty feet. You just calibrated to how much you want to put
on the land, which the ideal situation. Well my waste management plan
calls for each application to put a half-inch of water to the acre.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Now who gave you that plan?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

The soil and water. Then you calculate it when you have your lagoon
analysis done. Now like those over there that got flooded,
it's like point two three. This one, because it's
got a lot of hogs in it and it's never under water,
it's like one point seven eight. One point seven eight pounds
of nitrogen to a thousand gallons of water. So that's the way
I know my gun puts out a hundred fifteen gallons a minute. I keep track
of how many minutes it runs over how much acreage and just divide it. I
can tell how much I put and probably a pound to the acre. That acre is
probably, depending on the type grass, will be able to take any where
from eighty to one hundred twenty pounds of nitrogen a year.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

What does that grass do then? How do you use it?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

I use it for hay. I feel my cows with it and sell it. We do a nitrate
check on that before we sell the hay. We plug it; send it off and they
come back and tell you if the nitrate level is too high then you
don't sell it to people with horses because it'll
kill them. If it's two stages higher, you don't
feed it to cattle. It'll kill them.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Those are your own cattle.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

That's right. They aren't going to kill them.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Has some of that everߞwhen you've sprayed it on the
fieldsߞhas that run off? We hear about agricultural run off.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Not if you use your application rate. Half inch of rain on a field
isn't very much. It pretty much absorbs that. You
don't pump when it's raining. You don't
pump when you've got a whole lot of water on the ground.
You've got to have adequate grass cover to absorb what you
pump. That's why it changes. In the summertime on Coast
Bermuda, you can put about twice as much as I can put this time of year
on winter rye. Because the winter rye
doesn't use as much nitrogen as the Coast Bermuda does. I got
fescue over here I pump on in the wintertime. I've got about
twice as many acres as I've got Coastal because I
can't put as much on it. And then if you're going
to graze where you're pumping, you've got to have
more acreage to allow for what the cattle are going to discharge. So
that changes your formula all around. So I've got my cows on
another place I rent. I don't have any cattle on my property.
I just use it all for spray fields.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

You have to have how much property for four hog barns out here in order
to have enough land to spray it on?

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Twenty-seven acres. About nine acres to the barn for this six twenty
size.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Six hundred and twenty hogs finishing barn.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Figures about nine acres.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

And then you bale that hay and sell it and that gives you more income.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Yeah. I need twenty-seven acres for these and I've got a
hundred and twenty-eight.

ROB AMBERG:

That you're spraying on.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

So you're doing more acreage than your plan recommends.

JAMES (JIM) CONNOR:

Oh yeah and then that cuts down on the nitrate that I'm
putting on it because I'm spreading it on more area. Actually
I've got more land than I have water that I can pump.